The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

We’re all well aware that the tides have shifted in SEO. Building links for the sake of building links is no longer the best strategy.

We’ve all heard the gospel of great content being preached: "Just create great content, and the links will naturally come." While this may be true for brands with existing followings, it’s often a very different story for most SMBs.

The fact of the matter is that if a brand lacks social presence and followers, it may get more eyeballs on its great content by printing a copy, and stapling it to a tree.

For that reason, you need to pay to get that great content in front of the eyes that are most likely to share/blog/mention it. I’m going to show you how to do this using LinkedIn Ads.

LinkedIn, the resume site?

"LinkedIn?", you say? "Why would I share content on LinkedIn?", you ask? Very good question!

Everyone’s favorite professional social network is very well known for its ability to host your resume, as well as its usefulness in finding your next job. What you may not have noticed is that LinkedIn has been making great strides towards becoming a content hub, and it began back in 2012.

In 2012, LinkedIn released their Influencer program. It allowed business celebrities like Bill Gates and Richard Branson to publish long-form articles, and it allowed the likes of us peasants to follow that content without requiring said celebrities to accept our connections.

In 2013, the network announced its acquisition of Pulse, a news and content engine, which can push you content based on your industry, seniority, etc. It then released a new ad unit called "Sponsored Updates," which allows advertisers to put content in front of the right eyes.

In 2014, long-form posting (such as the likes of Arianna Huffington and Barack Obama enjoyed) was then released to all LinkedIn members.

You can see how, gradually, the professional network positioned itself to become the place you go for your business news.

Getting started

By now you may realize how helpful LinkedIn advertising can be for your content marketing efforts, but you don’t know how to get started. No problem! Here’s what you need:

1. Company page admin access

Sponsored Updates (the native ad unit that was built for sharing content effectively) require a connection to the company page. First and foremost, you’ll need to have an existing administrator of your LinkedIn company page add you to that as well.

Here’s that process:

Have your existing admin go to www.linkedin.com and search for your company nameClick on the result that is labeled "Company Page"Click the button at the top that says "Edit"Scroll down to the section called "Company Page Administrators"Type in the name of the person to be granted access (you, presumably). In order to add someone, you must be connected already on LinkedIn.Click "Publish" at the top of the page

If your company has not yet created a company page, that’s no problem either — they’re quick and easy. You can create your company page for free.

2. LinkedIn Ads account access

If you have an existing LinkedIn Ads account, here’s how to get access:

Have an account manager navigate to LinkedIn.com/adsLog into LinkedIn with personal credentialsSelect the company’s accountClick the cog wheel at the top-center of the page and click "User Access"Click "Add User"Type in the name of the person to be granted access (presumably you) and grant "Account Manager" (administrator) permissions

If you don’t already have an existing account, here’s how you do it:

Navigate to LinkedIn.com/adsClick "Get Started"Sign in with your LinkedIn credentialsClick "Add Account"Begin typing the name of your company name in the "Company Name" fieldCreate an account name (simply the name of your company is best, but anything to help you recognize which account you’re accessing if you manage several

Why use LinkedIn Ads?

Although the ads platform may not be pretty, or have the feature set we in PPC have come to expect, its granular control over B2B targeting can’t be beat. I’m certain you can see the value in being able to reach someone by:

Job title

Seniority level

Department

Industry

Company

Etc.

Who should I target?

That depends. Who would you get the most value out of seeing your content? Here are a couple angles that I’ve used:

1. Venture capital hack

Is your company getting ready to raise a round of funding? You could target those within the "Venture Capital & Private Equity" industry. The fact that potential investors have heard of you could mean precious increase to your valuation.

Here are the targeting settings where I did just that for a client:

2. Publisher hack

Do you want to get your content linked to? How about targeting those that buy ink by the barrel? Here’s what I’ve used for just such an occasion:

By reaching those with seniorities of manager and above in the publishing industries, you’re able to get your content in front of those who could cite, publish about, or otherwise authoritatively share your content.

Attitudes toward native ads

How do we feel about advertising? Savvy consumers are suspicious and skeptical of advertisers. The fantastic part about sponsoring content is the vast majority of consumers don’t view it as an ad. When you ask customers how they found you after arriving through sponsored content, you’ll get answers like "A friend shared…" or "I came across…"

Of course, if your sponsored update feels like an ad, you’ve shot all of your blissful goodwill in the foot.

What does it cost?

Depending on the audience, I’ve found LinkedIn clicks to cost between about $4–8. That being said, sharing content carries with it a huge advantage.

For those familiar with the AdWords auction system, it will come as no surprise that you can get significant discounts on your cost-per-click (CPC) if your click-through rate (CTR) is high.

For the uninitiated, each time a LinkedIn user loads a page on the site, there is an opportunity cost associated with showing an ad. Advertiser A may be willing to bid $20 per click, but if their CTR is .1% the platform would make, at most, $20 from showing the ad to 1k visitors. Contrast that with Advertiser B who is only bidding $3, but has a CTR of 1%, which results in a maximum of $30 to the platform for showing ads to those same 1k visitors.

This means that LinkedIn maximizes its revenue when advertisers have great CTRs, so it lowers costs of high CTR performers in order to reward them for their profitability.

The advantage, then, of sharing content that's low in friction and high in interest is that it garners high CTRs, and therefore lower CPCs than content that presents more friction.

Remember that you're targeting your ideal audience here, and getting as many of them as possible to your content/offers will likely pay significant dividends in the future.

Added bonus!

Remember in the section above when I mentioned getting your ideal audience in front of your content pays significant dividends? This is where I get more specific.

You’ve got your ideal audience to your site now, and you paid between $3–7 per click to do it, which is costly in many verticals. Do you keep relying on $3–7 clicks to continue to bring them back until they’re raving fans and ready to talk to your sales team? You could, but then your cost per engagement will look sky-high.

Contrast this with the possibility of placing your LinkedIn traffic into AdWords, Twitter, and Facebook retargeting audiences (tutorial here). You can even name those audiences after the persona you drove there (i.e. Media, or Venture Capital) to make interpretation of the accounts easy.

For instance, if your LinkedIn campaign is targeting media, then call your retargeting audience “Online Media Professionals” or something to that effect.

How much do you normally pay for retargeting traffic? $.60? $1? Less? Whatever it is, it’s bound to be a huge discount compared to your original source of the traffic, and the big advantage to you is that everyone in that audience, you got to qualify through the most effective B2B targeting.

Staying on top of your ideal audiences’ minds with banner ads is great and all, but what gets even more exciting is then using those retargeting audiences as persona development.

Persona development

From following the retargeting strategy above, you know that you’ll end up with a retargeting audience that contains your ideal audience. This allows you to serve a lot of impressions very inexpensively. Use this to your advantage to test content titles, etc.

Are you interested in finding out whether the phrase "data-driven" is more engaging than "big data?" How about testing colloquial messages as opposed to more formal? Try running different versions of the content in image A/B tests to test what resonates most with your persona!

As you test against this audience, you’ll start to find out how best to talk to them, and what types garner the greatest results. After all, you’re paying for the traffic, so you might as well get all the use out of it you can.

Recap

To sum it all up, start by gathering a significant announcement, and decide the influencer who would have the greatest sway over publishing/funding it. Target those folks using LinkedIn’s powerful ad targeting. Then retarget those visitors using your favorite retargeting channels to further invest in the influencers. Then watch business results happen, in a truly scalable fashion!

Great tips on how to reach our audience on Linkedin. The truth is that it is a tool that, at least in Spain, is used more as a tool for employment or collaborative purposes and less for commercial purposes

Really good thought, Luis. There are definitely different uses of the platform in various cultures. The targeting is a bit rough outside the English language due to not having true translations between job titles, etc. That being said, if you use the tactics as outlined in this article, the effect won't be that you'll look commercial. It will be sharing content/news/awesomeness with influencers, and that doesn't come off with a lot of commercial intent.

Also, because the tool isn't being used currently for commercial purposes tells me that there is likely low competition, which in paid ads space, results in cheaper CPCs :) I enjoy low competition.

This is great for businesses that need to target only professionals for sure. At my current client we can only utilize LinkedIn right now for social media (past issues with posting on others), but one thing that is true is your network is that of professionals normally and not just an audience that is family and friends.

I really like how you can check off each step in completing the tasks, but the part on how to target very specific crowds with the advertising in an affective way was the part that I was missing.

My 4 favorite types of targeting on LI are group, skill, job function, and job title. If you don't mind sharing who your audience is, I'd love to share how I'd recommend going about targeting them. We can workshop this in the comments :)

Happy to! So, if you're selling bikinis to these consumers, I'm guessing the CPC on LinkedIn ads is going to be too high to show an ROI. Instead, I'd probably recommend targeting buyers in retail chains where a conversion could turn out to be a large partnership worth millions of dollars. Or maybe people in the media who might feature your bikinis and drive business en masse. Think of the bigger fish for the more premium reach.

You're absolutely right about tagging people. Individuals can tag people, but the company can't, which is super annoying. The best way to do this is to comment as an employee of the company rather than as the company, and you should be able to @mention people.

Back to my question, if the CPC is too high for bikini ads, is there another way to purchase from Linkedin targeted leads? Or alternatively search for such leads (other than using the advanced search function)

And if you were searching for such leads using the advanced search method what string would you query?

Unfortunately, all the forms of advertising on LinkedIn are going to carry CPCs that would be prohibitively high for most retail. There are several advertising options, but they all pretty much start north of about $4.50/click (can be lower, but driving volume at that level can be difficult).

If you were to advertise on LinkedIn, I'd probably recommend something like:

Sex - FemaleAge - 25-54Seniority - CXO, Partner, Owner

That would allow you to hit women in the closest age ranges who likely have disposable income. You wouldn't be able to segment by interest in swimwear.

I would say that Facebook Ads would probably be a much better fit for your needs. You can target more precise age ranges, and can target by home value or yearly income, as well as interest in swimming or beaches, or even travel/vacations. The CPCs are going to be much lower, and likely more of a direct hit on the audience.

From an agency perspective I've found LinkedIn ads invaluable. The intention of business owners when on LinkedIn is to do business, so our conversion rate has been much higher than both Facebook and Google.

Great idea to leverage LinkedIn Ads for targeted advertising. I've tried Twitter Ads, Facebook Ads, content networks like Outbrain, Yelp Ads, etc., but I've never really thought about LinkedIn Ads. I knew of a cloud computing client who had done some advertising on LinkedIn but I assumed that was because their target market is highly technical business folk, who presumably are on LinkedIn. Your article helped me see that LinkedIn Ads can be used for other purposes - another social advertising tool for my toolbox!

Thanks for the great post. I used Linkedin Ads for about a month and it was interesting to say the least. I ended up getting a whole bunch of views and clicks but the only feedback I got was one client calling me to tell me that he saw a special on Linkedin (which was my ad) and wanted to know why he was paying more. That was a fun explanation.

I haven't however done any work whatsoever on promoting content so I may give that a go. What I am finding is that the norm for people to set up a profile on Linkedin just because they should is going away. Instead I see a lot more people going on for their news etc. as you mention in your post.

With this in mind I plan to try the targeting again but this time expand my audience a little to see if I can bring in more. I had a very similar cpc as well so I am hoping with a more engaged audience that I can expect that price to go down as well.

Ouch! Yeah, that's a painful result from advertising :( One trick I like to use is to use company name exclusions. In any campaign, you can include up to 100 companies that employees won't be shown ads. That could help with your initial case by excluding existing clients. (I really like to use it with competitors as well -- keeps all my competitors in the dark.)

Promoting content on LinkedIn is great when the effect of it can be a big moneymaker. The CPCs are pretty high to simply get your content out to a wider audience. I like to think of LinkedIn Ads as my sniper rifle, and FB/Tw as my shotguns.

As you expand your audience, I'd recommend targeting many small audiences rather than one large one. It makes it so you're better able to target messaging towards those tight groups, and you can quickly see which audience segments resonate with your message/content.

Great tips, and I also see this being used on my LinkedIn feed. Another great targeting strategy when you are interested in reaching very specific target group. I would guess that it is especially useful for content marketing as LinkedIn at least for me is mainly a professional knowledge hub, next to all the employment options of course.

Yeah, Pulse was released to LinkedIn Influencers back in 2013, but in 2014 they opened them up to all users. My favorite tactic is to publish on a blog first, wait for it to get indexed, and then republish to LinkedIn Pulse. Who cares about duplicate content when LinkedIn is the brand getting snubbed in the SERPs :)

Nice guidance to promote your content through LinkedIn Ads, I never tried LinkedIn Ads in my professional life but after reading your post.. i got to know that LinkedIn Ads really does have some powerful impact to endorse a brand online, I am looking forward it to implement it soon..

Thanks AJ, your post comes at good time. I read yesterday from Dr Peter about the future Serp Google may have in mind and all things taken into consideration it seems a good idea to diversify the channels in which online marketers put our efforts to increase brand awareness, etc.

So, you're a small business and you can't afford to build a social following but somehow you can manage to buy ads to promote content rather than buying ads to drive conversions? Huh?

And every time I've used LinkedIn ads people come to my site and immediately go to the careers page. Maybe this has changed, but I don't think LinkedIn is there yet. And at $4 a click, is it really worth it?

dcrader, the value here is that these influencers buy ink by the barrel. Having one of them write a blog post about your company would likely bring PR value, links and many very organic conversions. Much bigger fish than simply running ads to drive single conversions.

Also, if you're going for direct conversion, you do need to have a higher customer lifetime value to justify the elevated costs per click. If you're selling software that costs $100/mo, the economics probably won't work out favorably. If LTV is over about $15k, then it's usually quite worth it.

From a straight conversion standpoint, I've found LinkedIn to average about twice the conversion rate of similar Facebook ads audiences. The network does produce great response rates around career offers, but I definitely see the conversion value. Maybe try sending to a dedicated landing page where the career page isn't easily navigable?

Great article AJ; loved the tip about bucketing your LinkedIn audience segments and remarketing to them with AdWords. Brilliant!

I've run LinkedIn Ads off and on (currently using LinkedIn Lead Accelerator as well, but that's a different story), and while the targeting is addicting, the frustrating issues I've run into are (A) inventory of active users (B) short lifespan of ads.

So some questions for you on those two issues:(A) Do you have a minimum projected audience size you'll target to make it worth your time building a campaign for them, knowing that a fraction of that audience actually spends enough time on LinkedIn.com to see and click ads?(B) Do you have any recommendations for extending the lifetime of your LinkedIn ads? (In my experience impressions/clicks can trail off dramatically within first couple weeks.)

A) You bring up a really important point here about your return on effort as an advertiser. Of course showing your message to the exact 1000 people who are most relevant will produce REALLY efficient conversions, but an audience that small is almost impossible to scale any sort of healthy budget.

I generally like to create audiences that are between 20k-50k in size, for lead gen purposes. It's small enough that I still get to draw conclusions about who the audience is, and it's large enough that it can scale and spend some budget. For an influencer campaign, though, I tend to get a lot closer to that 1k audience size.

B) YES! LinkedIn is social display, and is not immune to the weaknesses of other social display. The biggest issue is ad saturation. I've found, under aggressive bidding, my CTRs start to trail off after about 28-33 days. As in your experience, it can happen sooner, or your ads might last longer.

To combat this, simply refreshing the ads (I suggest leading with an image switch) oftentimes brings you right back up.

LinkedIn is actually much kinder than the other social networks on saturation. I've found that FB ads tend to need refreshing after about 2 weeks (people check into FB many times per day, so it's easy to see how they'd saturate faster), and Twitter needs to be refreshed each week (less due to saturation, and more due to their quality score algorithm simply weighting recency of ad publish WAY too highly).

By the way, I've used Marin in the past for keeping ads fresh on Facebook by running automated multi-variate testing of photo/headline/text combos. Are you aware of any similar tools for LinkedIn ads?

Also, I would love to hear your thoughts on LinkedIn Lead Accelerator; have you posted them anywhere? To me, it's a very powerful tool with good results, I'm sorry it's dying, and I'm not confident it'll be pivoted into a tool that's as advertiser-friendly.

"By reaching those with seniorities of manager and above in the publishing industries, you’re able to get your content in front of those who could cite, publish about, or otherwise authoritatively share your content."

Cost per link is going to depend almost entirely on the audience and the message. I've had some campaigns that produced exactly the link the client wanted, and quite frankly, I've had some that didn't produce. Since the clicks are expensive, I would view this type of tactic to be a sniper rifle, rather than a shotgun. Being creative and thoughtful about both the target and the message is crucial to the result.

LinkedIn tends to have a very professional audience, so if your company and offer are very professional, you'll end up with better results than an environment like FB where it's much more personally-focused.

Thanks for this wonderful article. Can you help me with the better option in this scenario. I am targettig audience of 60 to 70 K for a b2b product. At this stage, we just want buzz around the brand. Will it be CPM a better pick or CPC. As you said average CPC for linkedin ads is $ 4 to $ 8. Naturally CPC is quite high but will CPM give due eyeballs or least prompt people to click on it. The objective is to increase website traffic of the brand. Have budget of approx. $ 1500 for a month.

Great question, Manish! Depending on your engagement rate, CPC or CPM may end up being the better deal. If your engagement rate is higher than 1% on LinkedIn sponsored content, bidding CPM will be a better deal. If below that, CPC will be better.

My objective for the traffic doesn't change how I bid. I'm always interested in the cheapest traffic.

Thanks for posting this article. I've been struggling a bit to build a new audience for my consulting business. However, I've found LinkedIn to be a great place to start with the network that I have built over the past two decades of my professional career.

I'm currently using AdWords with some success. I tried Facebook just to see what would happen (nothing came of it). I have yet to try LinkedIn. For some reason I've been hesitant to promote my business in this venue. I've come about it from another angle by producing content and linking to it from my account. This has been slow but I'm determined to keep at it.

What are your thoughts on promoting business services through LinkedIn? I only ask because I have yet to see someone else trying this approach in my feed.

Channels definitely have strengths and weaknesses based on their audience, but I'm of the opinion that if I'm able to identify the prospect on any channel, I'll do it. LinkedIn happens to have amazing audience segmentation for B2B, so quite often, it makes sense for B2B companies to consider. If you can use FB and AdWords to reach that prospect, I would recommend finding some channel mix that includes each of these channels.

LinkedIn tends to have a very professional audience, so if your company and offer are very professional, you'll end up with better results than an environment like FB where it's much more personally-focused.

That being said, if you're able to target your audience well from FB, it will almost certainly be a fraction of the price of reaching them on LinkedIn. If FB was a failure, and it wasn't due to the personal nature of the platform, then I would expect that your offer wouldn't fare well on LinkedIn also.